Quicksilver - By Neal Stephenson Page 0,2

molasses and tea and tobacco, and captains of the ships that carry those things. It could be any place in the world, for the same tavern is in London, Cadiz, Smyrna, and Manila, and the same men are in it. None of them cares, supposing they even know, that witches are being hanged five minutes’ walk away. He is much more comfortable in here than out there; but he has not come to be comfortable. The particular sea-captain he’s looking for—van Hoek—is not here. He backs out before the tavern-keeper can tempt him.

Back in America and among Puritans, he enters into narrower streets and heads north, leading his horse over a rickety wooden bridge thrown over a little mill-creek. Flotillas of shavings from some carpenter’s block-plane sail down the stream like ships going off to war. Underneath them the weak current nudges turds and bits of slaughtered animals down towards the harbor. It smells accordingly. No denying there is a tallow-chandlery not far upwind, where beast-grease not fit for eating is made into candles and soap.

“Did you come from Europe?”

He had sensed someone was following him, but seen nothing whenever he looked back. Now he knows why: his doppelgänger is a lad, moving about like a drop of quicksilver that cannot be trapped under the thumb. Ten years old, Enoch guesses. Then the boy thinks about smiling and his lips part. His gums support a rubble of adult teeth shouldering their way into pink gaps, and deciduous ones flapping like tavern signs on skin hinges. He’s closer to eight. But cod and corn have made him big for his age—at least by London standards. And he is precocious in every respect save social graces.

Enoch might answer, Yes, I am from Europe, where a boy addresses an old man as “sir,” if he addresses him at all. But he cannot get past the odd nomenclature. “Europe,” he repeats, “is that what you name it here? Most people there say Christendom.”

“But we have Christians here.”

“So this is Christendom, you are saying,” says Enoch, “but, obviously to you, I’ve come from somewhere else. Perhaps Europe is the better term, now that you mention it. Hmm.”

“What do other people call it?”

“Do I look like a schoolmaster to you?”

“No, but you talk like one.”

“You know something of schoolmasters, do you?”

“Yes, sir,” the boy says, faltering a bit as he sees the jaws of the trap swinging toward his leg.

“Yet here it is the middle of Monday—”

“The place was empty ’cause of the Hanging. I didn’t want to stay and—”

“And what?”

“Get more ahead of the others than I was already.”

“If you are ahead, the correct thing is to get used to it—not to make yourself into an imbecile. Come, you belong in school.”

“School is where one learns,” says the boy. “If you’d be so kind as to answer my question, sir, then I should be learning something, which would mean I were in school.”

The boy is obviously dangerous. So Enoch decides to accept the proposition. “You may address me as Mr. Root. And you are—?”

“Ben. Son of Josiah. The tallow-chandler. Why do you laugh, Mr. Root?”

“Because in most parts of Christendom—or Europe—tallow-chandlers’ sons do not go to grammar school. It is a peculiarity of . . . your people.” Enoch almost let slip the word Puritans. Back in England, where Puritans are a memory of a bygone age, or at worst streetcorner nuisances, the term serves well enough to lampoon the backwoodsmen of Massachusetts Bay Colony. But as he keeps being reminded here, the truth of the matter is more complex. From a coffeehouse in London, one may speak blithely of Islam and the Mussulman, but in Cairo such terms are void. Here Enoch is in the Puritans’ Cairo. “I shall answer your question,” Enoch says before Ben can let fly with any more. “What do people in other parts call the place I am from? Well, Islam—a larger, richer, and in most ways more sophisticated civilization that hems in the Christians of Europe to the east and the south—divides all the world into only three parts: their part, which is the dar al-Islam; the part with which they are friendly, which is the dar as-sulh, or House of Peace; and everything else, which is the dar al-harb, or House of War. The latter is, I’m sorry to say, a far more apt name than Christendom for the part of the world where most of the Christians live.”

“I know of the war,” Ben says coolly. “It